The Lost Woman (Sydney Smith, Text)

Reviewing a memoir with this much disturbing content is challenging, but I highly recommend this book for the strength and courage of the author’s voice, and the beauty of her writing. It is poetic, complex and powerful, filled with the anxiety of a trapped daughter with an emotionally deadened, controlling and damaged mother. For the author, her mother was ‘a problem I had to solve’, and we travel with her young self in the failed search for the solution. Sydney Smith was born and grew up in Wellington, New Zealand. She lived in fear of her Maori mother, and never knew what sort of parent she would be from one day to the next. Often, she was unfathomably cruel. Meanwhile, Smith’s anxiety-ridden pakeha father worked long hours in a butchery, and spent most of his free time drunk. They formed a family that provided little sympathy or understanding for any of its members, and Smith’s three brothers sought eventual escape that proved almost impossible for her. There is survival and hope, and a striving for understanding of her mother’s behaviour, which lifts this memoir above the crowded field of the genre.

 Sue Bond is a Brisbane-based writer and former bookseller

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Category: Reviews